Techs on Texts

Chris Beddow , mapmaker, voyager, philosopher, and very good skier uses Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" and Umberto Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" to go very very deep on the map–territory relationship . Listen and learn how to recognize how your experience on this planet is mediated by the maps you use. A few notes and links: Read Chris's essa...

Sean Gorman , geospatial entrepreneur extraordinaire, uses Dune to explain security policy, geopolitics, capitalism, sustainability, common knowledge, the erosion of common knowledge, the importance of friction in political institutions, reasons to think harder about opening up data, and why the OpenStreetMap community are basically Fremen. Note that we recorded this in August 2023, long before Du...

Jason Goldman, one of the world's foremost Dune podcast pioneers (listen to Escape Hatch !), talks about all of the Dune books, all of the Dune movies, the Dune TV shows, democracy, institutions, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the (a)moral arc of technological progress, the potential of governing with data, and how so many technologists miss the point of the literature they love. Our conversa...

I've listened to this episode countless times as I've edited it and it is such a gift . I'm really grateful to Tim for doing it with me. A few notes and links: Frank Herbert, by Tim O'Reilly Many of the works Tim mentions in this post are mentioned in this blog post: Books That Have Shaped How I Think At about 12:10, Tim mentions a passage about how Lao Tzu lists the attributes of a wise man, one...